Creationism vs Evolution

[Dr. Shoe]

I used to be an "evolutionist" until I realised that the so called "theory of Evolution" was merely a hypothesis that leaves more questions unanswered than it addresses. Everything about it says: "...then this might of happened, then that could have happened." To my enquiring mind this wasn't good enough, how could you start with a fish and end up with a human? I'm not what you would call religious, I rarely go to church but the more I think about it the more the Bible makes sense. Obviously, it is written in an archaic and figurative manner and much of it is poetic but taking the raw information it answers all the questions that have dogged scientists and philosophers for a hundred years. What came first, the chicken or the egg? The chicken did because God created all creatures after their own like. Where did man come from? God created them. What killed the dinosaurs? The Great Flood. This also marrooned Nessie in that giant rockpool that is Loch Ness. If a tree falls in the forest.... Ok I can't answer that one ! OK, you could point to fossils as evidence that the dinosaurs died 300 million years ago instead of 4,500 years as I would suggest, however, the great flood would have buried the dead under enormous pressures which would have been enough to cause total petrification within a thousand years instead of millions that the theory of evolution depends on. Did you know that man made artifacts have been found in solid rock? Well the debate's open, I know that there are going to be some people who feel very strongly about these matters and I respect their point of view just as I would ask that they respect mine. I have considered this point of view for twenty years and so if anyone can supply proof that would stand up in a court then I may change my point of view.

[azraelle]

how could you start with a fish and end up with a human?

Ever heard of "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny"?

Basically it means that if you observe a baby from fertilized egg to maturity, it goes through stages whereby, microscopically, you cannot tell it apart from a fish, then a reptile, then a bird, etc. Genetically, you can, but even there, ~95% of the DNA is the same as your average fish.

I believe God works with natural principles. There are too many coincidences pointing toward some form of evolution for me not to believe that evolution is a natural principle. So why couldn't God have created life by Directed Evolution??

What killed the dinosaurs? The Great Flood.

Noah was COMMANDED by God to take at least one breeding pair of every species of land animal then in existence onto the ark. Since the plans for the ark were also drawn up by God, I can't go along with this, Dr. Shoe. If dinosaurs were in existence at the time of Noah, then the ark would have been built big enough to accomodate them, since God is no respecter of persons, and all creatures are the same in His eyes. I can't imagine Noah second-guessing God about dinosaurs, or unicorns either, for that matter.

[Trolldeg]

maybe the dinosaurs had bad manners and were mean to the other animals?

[Laurieheels]

It only takes a few blood thirsty, flesh eating dinosaurs to become bullies and ruin it for the rest of them... I believe in both. Yes, I believe in creationism, and evolution. Together. See, this thing called Bible (from the Greek word Byblos, which we take to mean as book, but is actually the town where the reeds were grown to make scrolls) is designed to keep people in line. It was written over a very long time, and not in the order in which we read it now. If you are a holy man, trying to make sure people believe in a real and tangible God, you may need to answer a few questions. But the masses are not as educated as you, Holy man, so you need to tell them why God is real in terms they can understand, and then illustrate why living life a certain way is better, and makes God happy. Thus, the bible is written for a people thousands of years in the past. It is not written for us today. So when we read the creation story, we should not believe it as a literal event. After all, if God is above time, and does not share our own concept of time, how can we claim it took six or seven days to create the world? We didn't exist until day six in that story, and thus, we would have no memory of what came before. Day seven is a day of rest, and since we were created last, we didn't get to see anything else that he did! So who is to say that the Earth has only existed for X number of years? Because someone trying to keep peace in his society decided that seven days was a good number? Because seven days made God seem really powerful and thus, worth obeying? Yes, God created everything, but by our perceptions, billions of years ago. After all, a supreme entity can do whatever he or she would like! And can we not say that this entity, this being, laid out a plan for something, and set it in motion? And over time, it was adjusted, fixed, directed in certain ways, as needed? Creationism for me is God building a great program called the Universe, and then running it, and interacting with it as needed. Thus, God actually creates evolution, as there is a need to see how organisms will develop on their own. And when something needs adjusting, the all powerful programmer can go in and fix it. Now, we live in a computer age, so obviously we can see where my influence comes from. Still, as we progress, why should our understanding of life be based on what was told to under educated people three thousand years ago? Anyway, it's just my opinion. I don't believe in any actual denomination of a religion, I am just a Christian (and in some ways, I guess one could say I am a really big fan). But a mix of life experience showing me that there is something more than the every day world, plus some education, has led me to this middle ground. Okay, life is not a big game of Civilization, and God is not Sid Meier, but I still think the two things are connected, and not diametrically opposed.

[micha]

Where did man come from? God created them.

What killed the dinosaurs? The Great Flood. This also marrooned Nessie in that giant rockpool that is Loch Ness.

If a tree falls in the forest.... Ok I can't answer that one !

OK, you could point to fossils as evidence that the dinosaurs died 300 million years ago instead of 4,500 years as I would suggest, however, the great flood would have buried the dead under enormous pressures which would have been enough to cause total petrification within a thousand years instead of millions that the theory of evolution depends on. Did you know that man made artifacts have been found in solid rock?

Sorry, Dr. Shoe, you drive me crazy! Did you join now the Witnesses of Jahve? I can't imagine that you really want to tell us that the dinosaurs died out only 4500 years ago.

The archeologists know a reliable method for determining the age of biomatter: The carbon-14 method. The radioactive carbon 14 isotope is produced in the upper atmosphere by high energy cosmic radiation. It diffuses through the whole atmosphere and is incorporated into plants by assimilation. Animals incorporate it by eating plants. This process stops immediately after the death of the plant or the animal. The C 14 atoms decay more and more. The half-life time of C 14 ist 5760 years. And it is completely independent of mechanical pressure. Mechanical pressure influences the density of electrons in a molecule but never the nucleus of an atom.

Determining the C 14 content of bones or eggs of dinosaurs shows immediately: Your hypothesis is definitely wrong! Or do you believe, that God changes the laws of radioactive decay to confirm your speculations? By the way: the majority of scientists assume that the dinosaurs died out between 60 and 70 million years before our time.

Your maintainance, that God created the human beeings is as wrong as your statement about dinosaurs. Archeological findings show obviously that the human race has always been underlying a process of evolution.

The oldest findings of our race - the homo sapiens - are dated back more than 50000 years. Far beyond the time horizon of the Old Testament of the bible. Besides this there were existing in parallel other races like the homo neandertalensis (the first bones were found in 1856 in the Neandertal valley nearby Duesseldorf in Germany). The oldest findings of the species "homo erectus" have an age of several millions of years (-->Lucy in Africa).

Considering your statements I feel like Darwin and Galilei in a personal union: Fighting against the Middle Age and narrow-minded clericalism in the name of modern Enlightment.

I am an Atheist. Educated in Theoretical Physics. After reading Laurieheels answer I had not the slightest problem to accept her perception of Creation and Evolution. But what you wrote is hard to digest for me !

micha

[Francis]

Believe it or not, but I had the same argument with a Jehovahs Witness recently, who tried to tell me that God created the universe and everything in it. His initial argument was about the war in Iraq and that God was going to intervene. God didn't intervene in the Crimean, 1st or 2nd World Wars, Vietnam, Korea and other mass genocides that took place so why should he now? Anyway, back to the focus of this discussion. He tried to convince me that God made everything, to which I replied "He couldn't have". His answer was that if I didn't believe in God then how was everything created, after all, you can't create something from nothing now, can you? Or can you? Did God suddenly spring from nothing? If so, what did he use to create everything? Or did his materials spring from nothing? I believe he shot that point to bits himself! Evolution, the changing of an animal to suit it's environment through selective process. We have proven that man has evolved from a strain of ape. From a fish may be harder to swallow, but the DNA is similar. DNA, the building blocks of life, but we have also discovered that every living thing on this planet is based on carbon. One single most common element that is found everywhere in the universe. Everything eventually returns to carbon, irrespective of how it meets it's end. Another argument he made was about the dinosaurs. He maintained that God created the dinosaurs and that they were deemed to be bad and so sent an angel of death, a meteor to destroy them. Why? If God is so powerful and benevolent, did he destroy them in such a way? If God is that good, why did he not just click his fingers and they all vanish without trace? God, if he exists, must also have a cruel streak -or- God must have been elsewhere in the universe tending to another of his 'experiments' and overlooked this planet while a planetary disaster of sufficient magnitude wiped out the dinosaurs. Did God come back and go "Shit! What happened here? Oh Well! Start again!" or did God say "Ah good! That angel did their work well, but, what's this? They missed some!". For whatever reason, God messed up. Now some say that God is a supreme, omnipotent being who is infallible and then there's the mistakes and they say that God is human after all. Huh? Did they really just contradict themselves again? My belief is that all life on this rock started in a primordial pool of slime where two amino acids bonded together to form a protein. Whether that start was placed there or happened by coincidence no-one knows and can never prove, but it happened. We all evolved from that single puddle of goo ! So, in a sense, we are all related, be that to plants, fish, insects or beasts. We all evolved, just in different ways to each other. Life, we know, started properly in the seas and then evolved in that environment until one sea dwelling creature tried to go onto the land. It may have taken that species of fish several million years to develop the ability to move on land and breath air, but it did. Once on land and free of the oceans, it will have evolved to it's new environment. That species of land fish develops stronger fins with which to propel itself on land, eventually developing legs. Hey Presto! A newt, or something similar. Continental shifts split groups of these now land dependant newts apart and the environment changes as they go, so do the newts, who develop harder skin and abilities to help them in their new surroundings. Eventually other creatures from the masses of organisms from the seas develope a land version. Diversity is further created as the land masses change and the creatures inhabiting them adapt with them. One day, a creature developes fur to help it survive in colder climates. Eventually it becomes creative, smarter than most. It's abilities change due to increased awareness, it finds two legs are more convenient than four, stands upright and walks. Look out the window! Did you really think that God had a hand in developing the world as it is today? No! If God created the world then he must have been in a rush because he left behind so many different varieties of creature and plant that he couldn't have created them all. So are we living in a world where evolution means the ability to alter ourselves through selective process influenced by our environment or was created by a God like being who watches us constantly? If God exists and truly loves us all, why is there no proof? If God punished the wicked, why has that not happened? God may exist, and I'm not taking that away from anyone who wishes to believe it, but I personally find the idea ludicrous that the world had divine intervention for it's creation, but is not being tended by the so called loving, benevolent creator who is, apparently, reponsible. For the purposes of easy summary, we shall assume that a powerful deity exists and for this purpose we shall name this deity, GOD. Creationism? God created man in his own image, but created dinosaurs first and then destroyed them. Evolution? God creates an experiment involving protoplasm and leaves it to it's own devices to see how it all works out. Why not? They claim God lives in an extradimensional realm where time doesn't exist, so why won't God wait for several billion millenia for the result? Or maybe he used this planet before for and it didn't work out. Dinosaurs were wiped out! Who says that we aren't next? Answers some questions and creates more question than there are answers. If that sounds cryptic, it is, only because it's true. ps. my religious denomination had no influence on my reply. I'm an aetheist, but will listen to any reasoned debate. After all, 95% of the world's population labours under the belief of at least one deity, falsely or not, so there may, just may, be a little truth to it.

[Bubba136]

And, God said to Adam " about that bridge, did you want it to be 2 lane or 4 lane" ?

[jim]

I have found most evolutionists, when asked about the formation of our universe..also subscribe to the "Big Bang Theory". For some reason these folks beleave that first there was nothing...then it exploded and yada,yada,yada...and here we are! Hhhmmm.....That being the case,the Oxford Concise Dictionary must have come about through an explosion in a print factory.

[Francis]

ah, this would come back to the creation of something from nothing. We can't have that! God didn't create the Oxford Dictionary, the english language wasn't around at the time the bible was written. And he didn't create the Bible either. Neither did he write out the Ten Commandments, Moses chiselled them out in the stones. So we come back to the same argument. But, and this is a twist to the but, we have now found that something can be created from nothing. However, this only exists inside a computer and disappears when the power is turned off, unless you store it, but to store it requires something physical that was previously created by man. If God created everything, and truly loves us all, why did he create guns, with which we can kill each other? A bit contradictory isn't it?

[Trolldeg]

interesting:

http://home.san.rr.com/denbeste/humaneye.html

[Laurieheels]

If God created everything, and truly loves us all, why did he create guns, with which we can kill each other? A bit contradictory isn't it?

Some religions, or denominations, believe that God gave humanity free will, thus, people can go off and do things like kill one another. God creates, loves, forgives, but God is there to influence, not control. It's like a test, I guess. I think we might be failing it as a species. We'll have to work on that.

[Francis]

it's in human nature to destroy ourselves can't remember who said that, but it appears to be true !

[TallSwede]

As a complete sidetrack: Bubba136 wrote: And, God said to Adam " about that bridge, did you want it to be 2 lane or 4 lane" ? -Do you also happen to surf in to the Keep on a regular basis, or have you read that one somewhere else? (I do imagine that a lot of sites have had that one posted quite a while ago...). Regards, TallSwede

[Slim]

I am a christian and also an engineer. I don't see anything in evolution that throws a kink in my faith. The real problem (for thoes who like to argue about it) is that there is something rather than nothing. Anthropic principle?

[micha]

Believe it or not, but I had the same argument with a Jehovahs Witness recently, who tried to tell me that God created the universe and everything in it

Hello Francis,

believe it or not: Some years ago my door bell was ringing, I opened the door and a couple of missionaries of Jehovahs witnesses were standing in front of me. It became a tiresome discussion, because both tried all the time to convince me that the "Last day" (the punishment of God for all the evil, done by mankind) will come soon. I answered simply: "I'm an atheist but I'm not evil and nobody is able to look into the future. Forget your Doomsday scenario!". Oh God (*grin*), what had I done.... God's punishment for all the evil deep in me was a two hour massage by his most rigorous disciples :drinking:

I read your posting with pleasure. You wrote a perfect supplement to my contribution, all what I have forgotten to mention...

I don't believe in a real contradiction between Atheism and a serious(!) belief in God. I call it Nature, others call it God. The exclamation mark was necessary because of the many people with a childish understanding of their own religion (--> fundamentalism). Sorry, didn't intend to insult children.

I wonder always why Nature is so perfect. The slightest change in the basic physical interactions or physical constants and the biological evolution rsp. life would be presumably impossible.

micha

[Laurieheels]

it's in human nature to destroy ourselves

can't remember who said that, but it appears to be true !

I think that's paraphrased from Terminator 2. ;P

[Francis]

A-ha! The goddess' film preferences are showing it's more than likely to be correct, I shall check the film again. What am I talking about? It was in there! But, I'm sure that someone else said it.

[Laurieheels]

That does not really demonstrate the film preferences of the Goddess, so much as it demonstrates her ability to remember a great deal of useless information about such things. I prefer comedies myself, and fantasy. So some of my favourite movies are Lord of the Rings movies, as well as things like The Sweetest Thing and How to lose a Guy in Ten Days. (both of those comedies are ones I have yet to subject on Chris, but conversly, we have seen the Lord of the Rings movies together, FOTR on DVD and TTT in the theatre) In the afor mentioned Terminator movie, Arnold Schwarzenegger as the Terminator T-800 tells Edward Furlong as John Conner something like "it's human nature to destroy yourselves" as they watch some children run around with toy guns, trying to shoot one another, and then arguing about it. If I had this memory for school subjects my life would have been very different. In a way, that could be very bad indeed.

[Francis]

I think we're all guilty of being full of useless information but occasionally, a true gem comes out when we least expect it as for remembering stuff at school, who did? we get older and wiser and our ability to work out what is needed becomes clearer. we didn't do that at school ! if we did, we'd all be Oxford Scholars !! maybe future generations will have this ability, but will it be called part of evolution, who knows!

[Lisa]

  theory
       n 1: a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the
            natural world; an organized system of accepted knowledge
            that applies in a variety of circumstances to explain a
            specific set of phenomena; "theories can incorporate
            facts and laws and tested hypotheses"; "true in fact and
            theory"
       2: a tentative theory about the natural world; a concept that
          is not yet verified but that if true would explain certain
          facts or phenomena; "a scientific hypothesis that survives
          experimental testing becomes a scientific theory"; "he
          proposed a fresh theory of alkalis that later was accepted
          in chemical practices" [syn: {hypothesis}, {possibility}]

Its called a theory for a reason.

Chicken vs. Egg: Egg came first; a creature that wasn't quite a chicken laid an egg which contained the embryo that had sufficient mutations to be called a chicken.

Dead Dinos: Know that huge farking crater in the southwest?

Your "Great Flood" idea is so far fetched as to be part of a silly B-movie.

Genetic mutations have been witnessed, there is proof to support them - there is scientific proof that says the earth is several billion years old and that dinosaurs died out millions of years before some guy was nailed to a cross. Creationism has so many holes in it as to drive a semi through.

Not to mention, which "creation" story is right? They can't all be right...

[squirrelheels]

Time for me to join in!

Being the pedantic sort of person... I'm gonna start with agreeing with Laurie for the most part. (hehe, make sense of that!) I've been a Christian for 6 and a half years now (since my baptism), and over this period I've been fed information from two conflicting sources - my science teacher and my church. I agree with what Laurie has said for the most part, but I have still not fully formed a full opinion on the matter...

And for that reason, I'm now going to pick holes in the arguments of others!

God didn't intervene in the Crimean, 1st or 2nd World Wars, Vietnam, Korea and other mass genocides that took place so why should he now?

Ok... How do you define "intervene"? If by intervene you are meaning for God to come down with a big stick and beat the bad guys to a pulp, then no, he didn't intervene. But God very rarely works like that. He works on a personal level too. Being a Christian is all about having a personal relationship with God, not some big guy with a lightening bolt stick that he can zap people with. There will have been countless Christians who went through that war who survived only on their faith to get them through. God performs miracles in a small way by answering prayers such as "God help my survive this day without getting shot", or "I pray that we'll find a way out of where we're currently hiding" (taking the perspective of the civillian victims here). On that level, God intervened, so I'm sorry, but that statement is completely false.

it's in human nature to destroy ourselves

can't remember who said that, but it appears to be true!

Well... I'd disagree. Human nature varies from person to person. It all depends on the up bringing of a person and what ideas of life the person has been subjected to as they develop as a human being.... As such, we get people such as Mother Teresa, and Gandhi (I can't spell his first name! Mahatma?) who for them, human nature is to be kind, loving, compassionate etc.

Then on the other hand, we have someone like Hitler, or George W Bush , whose human natures are not quite the same, to say the least. (I'm not likening the two of them).

So it is not human nature to kill each other. Everyone has a conscience, some people just choose to ignore it because of the way their life has panned out from day 1.

If God created everything, and truly loves us all, why did he create guns, with which we can kill each other? A bit contradictory isn't it?

I'm not picking on you, Francis, honest! Anyway...

Aren't you contradicting yourself? A few lines above that, you say that God didn't create the dictionary, nor did he write the bible of the ten commandments. Very true indeed. How, then, can you say that God created guns? The gun is something conceived by humans, made by humans, and used by humans. The Bible (and indeed the 10 commandments) were conceived by God, "made" by God, but recorded and used by humans. Get it right!

Ok, I'm feeling a bit ranty now. Don't take it personally!

I opened the door and a couple of missionaries of Jehovahs witnesses were standing in front of me. It became a tiresome discussion...

I can't stand the Jehovah's Witnesses. Not only is it a religion created primarily for money by man (ok, mormans win on that one), (whilst they don't appear to condone it outwardly), they allow paedophilia to go on amongst their ranks... oh, and my primary reason for disliking them, is that they give God such a bad name that it's almost untrue.... Grrrrr @ them

(If any of you are Morman or JW, don't take it personally, please)

And, God said to Adam "About that bridge, did you want it to be 2 lane or 4 lane?"

4 lane, with 3 lanes of roadworks at any one time!

Some religions, or denominations, believe that God gave humanity free will, thus, people can go off and do things like kill one another. God creates, loves, forgives, but God is there to influence, not control.

Exactly.

It's like a test, I guess. I think we might be failing it as a species. We'll have to work on that.

It might be like a test, but it isn't God doesn't put us to the test. That's one of his unfailing promises. As for failing as a species... well, I think some members of the species are failing, or have already failed. Some of us are doing alright.

Hhhmmm.....That being the case,the Oxford Concise Dictionary must have come about through an explosion in a print factory.

Hahahah That made me laugh... I never looked at it like that, but it's a very accurate analogy! Poo to evolution! (Ok, so not the strongest argument against it! )

Your "Great Flood" idea is so far fetched as to be part of a silly B-movie.

Yes, almost as far fetched as your evolution "theory". The very idea that something like us can evolve out of a random explosion several billion years ago is quite frankly proposterous. Yes, it's a nice theory and all, but please, let's see the proof for this big bang?

There is proof already for things that happened in the Bible. Until you can prove the Bible wrong, I'm not going to believe any evolution/big bang poppycock.

Evolve:

1) To develop or achieve gradually

2) To work (something) out; devise (does that mean I evolve at the gym?! )

I'm not saying things haven't evolved. I evolve. That is the nature of humans - to learn from and adapt to our environment. When I stuck my fingers in an electric socket, my reaction was along this line of: "Ouch, that wasn't nice. Mustn't do that again". That shows development, working something out.... (ok, perhaps not achieving!), therefore I evolve.

Similarly, I'm not saying genetic mutations haven't occurred. I'm positive that they have been witnessed, but that's not to say we evolved from an ape-like creature. If there's one thing I learned from GCSE Biology, it's that genetic mutations rarely survive because they have too many imperfections to survive. It's a huge jump from saying that genetic mutations can and have occurred to then say that we mutated, evolved, or whatever you like, from an ape-like creature. Would you need some kind of 4 lane bridge a few thousand light years long to bridge that gap?!?!?!

Which creation story? Well, the Christian one is right of course!!!! Seriously... Christianity is one of the few religions/faiths that states that the leader of it created the universe. If you take Buddhism for example, it's based on the teachings of one human a long time ago, who never claimed to create the universe. Islaam and Judaism share the same creation story (although with maybe different names for God), since Judaism is Christianity minus Jesus (essentially), and Islaam has strong ties to Christianity through Abra(ha)m. (Abram being the father of Mohamed).

Hmm... scary to think I actually learnt something in all those RE lessons!!!

Ok, rant over. Like I say, don't take it personally. And I may not have my facts straight about the creations stories, so don't quote me on that one.

Heh, just my 3 pennies' worth!

SH

[Lisa]

Time for me to join in!

SH

The overwhelming, tangible, empirical evidence towards The Theory of Evolution outweighs that of Creationism's hefty reliance on a book which a fifth of the planet doesn't believe to be true.

You can believe the Bible all you want and your blissful ignorance can never be put aside. You can not refute the overwhelming proof from science (towards cosmology and biology).

http://www.talkorigins.org/origins/faqs-evolution.html

This topic has been covered a thousand times in a thousand languages - nothing unqiue is left to be said: Science is producing more proof each year and the Bible stays the same (until it is retranslated, or the Pope tells his followers that its all wrong).

[Bubba136]

Lisa wrote:

Science is producing more proof each year

As factual as this is, might it not be that a certain amount of eveloution is included in God's basic plan? After all, organisms do mutate, change and evolve with conditions. I believe if it wasn't part of Gods plan, then this wouldn't happen.

Actually, I think this whole arguement a waste of time. Trying to prove the unprovable. I believe in God. I am a Christian. I am a beificiary of God's powers. I will never hesitate bear witness as to how God has helped me and my family in our daily lives. It's ok if you want do spend your life trying to prove me wrong. It's your life and your time. However, don't waste it on me. It's an individual choice. And, while making well worded, intellectually sounding statements to support your arguement, please stop short of labeling anyone that doesn't agree with you as succumbing to "blissful ignorance."

[Dr. Shoe]

The overwhelming, tangible, empirical evidence towards The Theory of Evolution outweighs that of Creationism's hefty reliance on a book which a fifth of the planet doesn't believe to be true.

You can believe the Bible all you want and your blissful ignorance can never be put aside. You can not refute the overwhelming proof from science (towards cosmology and biology).

http://www.talkorigins.org/origins/faqs-evolution.html

This topic has been covered a thousand times in a thousand languages - nothing unqiue is left to be said: Science is producing more proof each year and the Bible stays the same (until it is retranslated, or the Pope tells his followers that its all wrong).

Actually, this is my initial point. Science is NOT producing proof at all. The whole "theory" of evolution is only a mere hypothesis. Despite claims to the contrary, it is impossible to produce any living organism at all in a laboratory- if this is not possible by science how could it possibly happen "accidently"?

Everything that Darwin tells us is based on an idea that was formulated by noticing that there different "species" of tortoise on different islands in the Galapagos. In fact they are not different speces (plural?) at all in the same way that a Labarador is not a different species from a Collie.

Evolution depends on "survival of the fittest" this implies that the species from which the new one evolved would not have been fit to survive yet we still have fish, we still have newts, we still have lizards and we still have apes. Moreover, in the wild if a mother gives birth to an infant that does not conform to the norm, the mother will invariably reject it and let it die.

Many evolutionists point to foetal development to "prove" their hypothesis, this is a myth. Although the foetus bears superficial similarities to other species during development the similarities start and end at that point. For example, at no point during development does a human foetus have any of the internal organs of a fish, nor will it ever have scales, fins or gills (undeveloped lungs yes, gills no). At no point will the digits be developed enough to qualify as those of a lizard. Until it enters the third trimester, the eye is unable to distinguish anything other than light and shade, a distinct drawback if this is supposed to be in any way similar to a living creature.

Another reason that destroys the evolution myth is the fact that apes do not have webbed hands like humans do and "science" can't figure out why.

I just want to remind everyone what science have claimed as fact:

There are 4 elements, earth, wind, fire and water and everything is composed of a combination of each.

The sun and planets circle the earth. Even to this day, astrologers talk about planets being in retrograde.

A vacuum cannot possibly exist.

Man can never construct a machine that will fly. This was actually achieved only 11 years after this was said.

"Electric light will never be a possibility in my lifetime"- Thomas Edison who went on to invent the light bulb!

The atom is the smallest particle in existence and cannot be split. The first nuclear weapon was tested only 20 years later.

"The world is flat!" Ok, I know it was the church that said this despite the fact that the Greeks had scientifically proven otherwise around a thousand years beforehand.

In conclusion, I have not read anything here that has swayed me from my belief that evolution is a myth. I can accept that the bible is not perfect either, but in the absence of clear, uncontrovertable fact it does , in my opinion, most closely match what I perceive to be true. Moreover, if this was being considered in court, the bible would be taken as "documentary evidence" whereas the theory of evolution would be inadmissable as mere supposition!

[Dr. Shoe]

This is from "www.talkorigins.org/origins/faqs-evolution.html", I like this guy, he's funny.

"The English moth, Biston betularia, is a frequently cited example of observed evolution. [evolution: a change in the gene pool] In this moth there are two color morphs, light and dark. H. B. D. Kettlewell found that dark moths constituted less than 2% of the population prior to 1848. The frequency of the dark morph increased in the years following. By 1898, the 95% of the moths in Manchester and other highly industrialized areas were of the dark type. Their frequency was less in rural areas. The moth population changed from mostly light colored moths to mostly dark colored moths. The moths' color was primarily determined by a single gene. [gene: a hereditary unit] So, the change in frequency of dark colored moths represented a change in the gene pool. [gene pool: the set all of genes in a population] This change was, by definition, evolution."

I had barely read one paragraph when I spotted the first mistake: The two moths are not separate species. Firstly, the entire species carries the dark and light gene and secondly, the two types can interbreed producing larvae which will develop into either light moths or dark moths.

Also, evolution is not a change in the gene pool, it is the mutation of a separate species to adapt to a specific environment. The only reason why there are more dark moths in Manchester is because the light ones get picked off by birds when they show up against the black sooty trees.

Moreover, the only way you can change the gene pool is to introduce a new gene, since this HD Kettlewell character admitted that "the dark morph represented 2% of the population" no new genes have been introduced.

[Laurieheels]

I hate to be a bible basher, but here goes. If I asked "how many of each animal did Noah take on the ark?" everyone would probably say "two!" But, um, if you have a good translation, one that is made off of an old copy, and we're not talking St. James here... you will see that this one flood story has two different explanations in it. If I remember my university correctly, the story actually says two of every animal, and then goes on to mention seven of every clean animal. So which is it, two of every animal, or seven of the clean animals only? And how did Noah know what was a clean animal, as that was explained in a book of the Bible, which was written after the flood event. This is not to disprove creationism. It is to show a flaw in the egeneral perception of the Bible as law and truth. It's just a retelling to help people understand. Why should we listen to God? Because he is all powerful! He can wipe out the world with a flood! Oh yeah, says who? Well, it happened once....but he put his bow in the sky as a promise never to do that one again. He has other scary powers, listen to this one about these two cities where the people were wicked and wanted to have sex with some angels. Ooo he was mad that day! How anyone can stick to creationism as the Earth being four thousand years old, and God creating the world in seven days is silly. All we are doing is placing human concepts on God, an all powerful being, above space and time, and that is unfair. Besides, if God is all powerful, why could God not create a process called evolution, and add this to the world? If not, then God is not omnipotent, and thus, everything falls apart from there. So why can't we have both co-existing? If we can think of something in our minds, then certainly, a supreme being can make it reality.

[Trolldeg]

from http://www.mala.bc.ca/~johnstoi/essays/courtenay1.htm

The first step in demonstrating the truth of evolution is to make the claim that all living creatures must have a living parent. This point has been overwhelmingly established in the past century and a half, ever since the French scientist Louis Pasteur demonstrated how fermentation took place and thus laid to rest centuries of stories about beetles arising spontaneously out of dung or gut worms being miraculously produced from non-living material. There is absolutely no evidence for this ancient belief. Living creatures must come from other living creatures. It does no damage to this point to claim that life must have had some origin way back in time, perhaps in a chemical reaction of inorganic materials (in some primordial soup) or in some invasion from outer space. That may well be true. But what is clear is that any such origin for living things or living material must result in a very simple organism. There is no evidence whatsoever (except in science fiction like Frankenstein) that inorganic chemical processes can produce complex, multi-cellular living creatures (the recent experiments cloning sheep, of course, are based on living tissue from other sheep).

The second important point in the case for evolution is that some living creatures are very different from some others. This, I take it, is self-evident. Let me cite a common example: many animals have what we call an internal skeletal structure featuring a backbone and skull. We call these animals vertebrates. Most animals do not have these features (we call them invertebrates). The distinction between vertebrates and invertebrates is something no one who cares to look at samples of both can reasonably deny, and, so far as I am aware, no one hostile to evolution has ever denied a fact so apparent to anyone who observes the world for a few moments.

The final point in the case for evolution is this: simple animals and plants existed on earth long before more complex ones (invertebrate animals, for example, were around for a very long time before there were any vertebrates). Here again, the evidence from fossils is overwhelming. In the deepest rock layers, there are no signs of life. The first fossil remains are of very simple living things. As the strata get more recent, the variety and complexity of life increase (although not at a uniform rate). In all the countless geological excavations and inspections (for example, of the Grand Canyon), no one has ever come up with a genuine fossil remnant which goes against this general principle (and it would only take one genuine find to overturn this principle).

Well, if we put these three points together, the case for evolution is air tight. If all living creatures must have a living parent, if living creatures are different, and if simpler forms were around before the more complex forms, then the more complex forms must have come from the simpler forms (e.g., vertebrates from invertebrates). There is simply no other way of dealing reasonably with the evidence we have. Of course, one might deny (as some do) that the layers of the earth represent a succession of very lengthy epochs and claim, for example, that the Grand Canyon was created in a matter of days, but this surely violates scientific observation as much as does the claim that, say, vertebrates just, well, appeared one day out of a spontaneous combination of chemicals.

[azraelle]

(If any of you are Morman or JW, don't take it personally, please)

Actually I am a "Mormon" so how could I be offended??

Dr. Shoe, you apparently didn't read the article(s) on random genetic drift.

They augment the evolutionary argument in a completely unrelated way. You seem to ignore the things you feel you can't explain away, and hope that no one notices.

An objective reading of the Genesis account should find no serious disagreement between a creation story written for the masses of superstitious intellectual ants that existed at the time of Moses, and historical geology as it is understood today. God started with the lesser forms of life, necessarily dividing the land from the sea before he started the process of creating life, and advanced to the higher forms only after the process had been perfected ("~and God saw that it was good...").

Judging from the modern-day lunacy and mind-boggling ability of otherwise mentally-capable human beings to ignore the obvious and still adhere to so-called creationist doctrine of an actual 6-day universal creation, it is only logical for Moses, to whom God showed all his creations--and enlarged his mind, somewhat, as to how he did it ("~I now know that [compared to God] man is nothing, which thing I had never before supposed..."), to have to greatly simplify the creation story for the Israelites. The vast majority, after 400 years of slavery in Egypt, probably couldn't read, probably would have had difficulty counting past 50, and couldn't possibly comprehend the vastness of what we know as time.

A scene from the movie Robin Hood, Prince of Theives (starring Kevin Costner) comes to mind--where one of the men asks Robin how many soldiers there are (there are ~50 or more) and he says 20, whereupon his Moorish companion asks him about the obvious discrepancy (to someone who knew how to count) and Robin says "they won't know the difference, anyway"! Or for that matter the fact that the words used for the numbering system in French changes completely at "40", the obvious implication that the commoners weren't expected (allowed?) to be able to count (or for that matter live past 40.

Might we not expect a similar situation to exist in the time of Moses? If you look at all the rules that are in Numbers and Deuteronomy for carrying on their everyday life, you get a pretty good idea of the intellectual dolldrum that Moses' people occupied. So he put the creation of the world in terms that the Israelites at the time could understand.

[Laurieheels]

Very well put, Azraelle, as to how and why things are as they are in this collection called Bible. Jimmy, ring the bell! After all, as some ameture writer, I do write for the audience. It is obvious that you have to tailor the details of the story to fit those who are going to hear it or read it. Hopefully, we won't have any of that "The Bible is the Word of God, given to people and written down as he told it to them" because, let's face it, the complexities of a supreme being are not going to be understood by regular people. So even God would have to cater to the audience, or just allow the writers who were inspired (latin -inspiro[sp?], to breathe into) to get the uneducated masses to understand what they were supposed to do.

[Francis]

for all the reliance on a single book that probably has no real information as to the origins of man, save superstition, there is a heavy dependancy on it for the arguments being presented. The Bible has been refuted to be the oldest book in the world. Possibly, but who can tell. The first man couldn't read or write, instead he drew on cave walls (after the discovery that certain things would leave a lasting mark on solid objects) the things he observed and wanted to remember. The spoken word might have been handed down from generation to generation, as is the tradition of certain native American-Indian cultures, but even this is open to interpretation. Those who remember playing Chinese Whispers will know how the spoken word changes even before it comes back. The Bible was created by those who could read and write, ie those in power, to keep the commoners in check. If you were told that there was being, of untold power, in the skies who would kill you where you stood wouldn't you be inclined to do as you were told? Even when the masses could read, they still believed that this 'being' was there, because their parents believed. Their parents couldn't be wrong, could they? Heavy reliance on this book has caused many social problems over the centuries. Take Salem, Mass. for example. The 'God fearing masses' ( now why would they fear God?) killing many innocent people accused of witchcraft on the say so of a few young women. These girls used the word in the book that all believed in to be true and the fear that God would punish them if they didn't kill these so-called 'practisers of the dark arts'. God fearing, indeed! If the Bible can be used to justify anything that happens in the world today, then it's being used to justify life on this planet only because it's, supposedly, the oldest book around. Science is based on fact and hypothesis. A hyphothesis because it hasn't been made fact, but that's what science sets out to prove. Some argue that evolution doesn't happen. Yes, there are still fish, newts, lizards and the rest. Why? Because not all organisms chose to go in certain directions. There are signs of evolution still we can see, although the reasons for the changes may not be readily recognised as a bonus to the human species, but people are getting taller and foot size is getting bigger. Why? Who knows! But I'm sure that science, some day, will have an answer. Or is someone going to say that it is God's will that people will change? Science doesn't have all the answers and neither does the Bible. Here's another hypothesis that will throw a spanner in the works. A supreme being creates a planet inhabited with large reptilian creatures, another supreme being creates a planet with an advanced civilisation on it. The advanced planet discovers space travel and decides to go out and explore. A meteor plows into the reptilian planet wiping out the vast majority of the creatures inhabiting it, the advanced planet finds it eons later and decides to settle the world, but disease of unforeseen nature wipes out the older generations. The younger generation left unattended with no language or culture somehow survives and adapts leaving the settled areas believing them to be dangerous. They become Nomads, travelling from place to place eventually stopping long enough to build villages. Their civilisation grows and becomes too large for a single group. They split and set of in different directions, those groups later splitting through conflicts or unmanageable numbers. A diverse populace needs maintaining, but how? Somewhere along the line, there is a story about how they came from the sky. How, they are not sure, but different opinions are rife. Someone invents a way for communication to be recorded and understood. The story of their origins are told to all that will listen. Some believe this, some don't. Life experience or education changes facts and what you believe is clouded by what are taught. The people have choices believing that they stem from a supreme being or have evolved from the other creatures that inhabit the planet, thus creating a debate between creationism or evolution. Now imagine that I went back in time and spread this story to anyone who'd believe and it gets written down. It becomes widely believed because it's written in the oldest known book. Does this then become a religion, a myth or a fact? Don't sit there shaking your head in disbelief, because you've already have chosen your belief, instead look at it from the point of someone with no belief. If you were a person in ancient times who wanted an answer for where you came from and came across this hypothesis first and another later, which would you believe. The one that made most sense to you, wouldn't you? But which is true? You don't have the answer, I don't have the answer, but maybe there is more than two stories that could apply. So were we created by a God, evolve from lower lifeforms or were a subject of an accident from some extraterrestrial lifeform or maybe even a planned one? Who knows? But one thing is for sure, if I been in around in the middle east at the time when Jesus was supposedly born and told my tale of life on this planet, I would have been stoned to death by the God fearing populace, but maybe someone would have believed me. I await your dissection of my story, as I'm sure there will be many who will not subscribe to this 'madness'. But before you do, just think on it a little to discover how much truth there could have been in it.